Summer – the 8 – 12 week period where our little corner of the work world experiences a wave of vacation time unlike any other industry.
With school out, the sun high, and the lake beaconing us all, organizations across the Prairies tend to run short-staffed. HR Departments and Management teams tasked to maintain and/or even grow the workforce in these months face several challenges. Keep your recruitment process on track even when your team is running lean by following these tips:
Be Proactive!
At least one week prior to the vacation time, proactively check-in with your hiring team to ensure job requisitions are submitted and/or approved before upcoming absences. This will ensure you’re able to advertise the position and begin to gather/screen candidates while the Manager vacations.
Depending on your process and/or efficiency, you’ll be setting the stage for an appropriately loaded recruitment funnel for review on return. Not only will you decrease lag time and maintain a strong time to hire pace, your Manager will be able to effectively continue the process on their return. If you’ve invested in ATS technology for your team, the vacationed Manager will return to a prepopulated, prescreened, and sorted list of candidates to review. And with rested eyes, too!
In this same meeting but at least a week before, ensure you verify any budget requirements. Depending on where you are in the process, some logistics may be required (interview space, assessment administration, sourcing an Executive Recruiter) and you’ll need to be prepared.
Nothing wastes more time in the recruitment process than a couple of weeks where nothing moves because of an approval hold up. By ensuring your hiring team has access to the approvers and required budgets to successfully manage the process, your quality and efficiency of onboarding great staff will maintain through vacation periods.
Communication & Coverage
It’s important for the hiring teams to understand who’s away when and what affect that will have. Many organizations/hiring teams will assign someone to ‘cover’ in the process while an internal vacation occurs. For some business functions, ‘coverage’ may work. In the recruitment process, this can be a challenge.
Consider this; you agree to screen a group of resumes and book interviews for a line manager in your organization. You work in different departments but have similar recruitment responsibilities respectively. But, because you perform this task for your department and the company needs this vacancy filled, you find some time away from your regular duties to dive into the list of applicants.
Soon into the review stage, you realize it’s taking significantly longer to screen the list of resumes from your neighbouring department rather than from your own. Regardless, you don’t want to hold things up and were asked to help your teammate out, so you go ahead and contact a few individuals for interview upon your colleges’ return. Later, you’re told that none of those interviews you lined up were successful and an entire round had to be rebooked – now what was the point of all that extra work??
Setting up an automated email response to the applicants that simply communicates the expected application review timeline will maintain quality and efficiency in the recruitment process. Quickly stating that applications will be reviewed after a certain number of weeks or a specific date will help the candidate understand the timeline and maintain quality of hire for your organization. Depending on where you’re at in the process and what tools your team has access to, coverage may or may not be an appropriate option.
Add Efficiency
With the advancing use of technology for many business functions, efficiencies can be realized more quickly than ever before. Like any business process, recruitment and onboarding can be derailed without specific tasks/steps checked off. While hiring team members enjoy vacation, your recruitment must stay on track.
When an approved job requisition needs advertisement, you can’t be held up by the HR Assistant being on holidays and having all the passwords to your various job board accounts in some Excel file, buried deep in the admin computer. But, that specific person does not need to be the one to push those job ads out to the market. Adding a job broadcasting and/or candidate sourcing efficiency, your vacancies can be advertised by anyone at anytime (following your internal approval process of course). Simply pushing data to a job board does not require the same attention and skill level as screening candidates and conducting interviews.
Similarly, a key member of your hiring team may be away when preparing for a new employee’s first day of work. An onboarding efficiency that automates workflows and task reminders to your hiring team will keep your process on track and allow your organization to be fully prepared when the new employee starts. Your organization can do all this – even while internal vacations occur.
To hear more about adding efficiencies and workflows to your recruitment and onboarding processes, or how to stay on top of your recruitment process contact SmartHire® today!
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